


cut your little heart out

by redledgers



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Family, Gen, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-20
Updated: 2017-07-20
Packaged: 2018-12-04 10:53:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11553699
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redledgers/pseuds/redledgers
Summary: Cassandra wakes as something else.





	cut your little heart out

When she wakes, everything is cold. It’s not the familiar chill of stone and shadows, but something sharper. Something that cleaves through her straight to the bone, splits her in halves and keeps going. And then it burns, lancing through her with white-hot metal. She needs…she needs a drink. It goes beyond need, trickles into _desire_ and _gluttony_ and when she sits up the world spins until it clicks into a new perspective. And there is _hunger_.

Delilah is beside her in an instant; whether she had been there the whole time or an alarm had been set off, Cassandra doesn’t know. But she can smell something now as Delilah draws close: the sharp-sweet scent of just turning flowers, the metallic tang of iron and copper. “How do you feel, my sweet?” Her touch feels like lightning, like shocking oneself on winter furs, as she caresses Cassandra’s hair.

It’s _there_ and Cassandra looks at her, finds herself running her tongue along her teeth and oh that’s different but it’s _good_. There’s mention of fixing her needs and _“I’ll guide you like a good mother does”_ and suddenly she feels like she belongs. _You’re just like Sylas now_ and she will learn to act like Delilah, look like Delilah, be the only daughter she never was.

*

Summers in Whitestone are mercifully clouded now, but still she keeps to the cold stone halls, lets herself be mothered, and just _survives_. There is vengeance burning deep within her, the only warm thing in her body now. Something about looking into the eyes of someone she calls mother, someone who raised her back and swayed her, and plunging a white-hot dagger into her chest turns it into a wildfire. Looking into the eyes of someone she resembles more than her own family, her own brother who stands across the room with a gun raised toward her, is petrifying. But he doesn’t know.

She hides, keeps the excuse that they were never close as children, finds tweezers in her hand when she’s alone in her darkened room without anyone to help her use them. His friends are sweet but she _can’t_ and she feels as if she is wasting away. (She _is_ wasting away, hungry and tired and lost.) But there is no point in hiding away for too long, even as the Sun Tree blooms and the skies are full of light once more. Even as she desires, hides pointed fangs in careful smiles, and shies away from touch, she cannot hide with these people in her mother’s castle.

*

When she wakes, everything is warm. It feels like a dream, and maybe it is a dream (it’s not, she knows, she was crucified and brought back again, wished back to life and she has stared into the face of the Dawnfather himself). There is something else, tearful smiles, white-streaked hair in her peripherals, and she feels more like herself than she has in five years of undeath, of five years of belonging elsewhere. And there is _stillness._

 

**Author's Note:**

> i do love cassandra please do not fight me


End file.
